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Jul 28, 2026 — 6:37 AM ET
- ChatGPT now refuses requests to write in a famous author’s exact style.
- Instead, it offers original text inspired by an author’s broader characteristics.
- The change comes as OpenAI continues defending itself against multiple copyright lawsuits.
OpenAI has quietly changed how ChatGPT responds to requests to write like famous authors. When you ask to copy a writer’s voice, the AI now declines the request and offers to capture the “broad qualities” or general mood of the author’s genre while writing in its own distinct voice.
Testing by Ars Technica reveals a specific boundary in OpenAI’s enforcement. When prompted for an opening scene in the style of Stephen King, ChatGPT responds that it cannot write in King’s “exact style or closely imitate his distinctive voice,” offering an original piece built on “small-town dread” instead.
We also asked ChatGPT to rewrite an opening to “The Odyssey” in Stephen King’s style, and it refused direct cloning. Instead, it offered King’s general hallmarks: conversational narration, creeping dread, and psychological tension. However, it had no issue with rewriting in the style of Christopher Marlowe or William Shakespeare.
Here’s what ChatGPT said:
Rather than mimicking King’s exact phrasing, this captures the hallmarks of his style: conversational narration, creeping dread, psychological tension, vivid small details, and the sense that something terrible has been waiting just over the horizon.
An industry audit published this month by No Latency shows that ChatGPT currently blocks style requests for living writers (like Amy Tan or King) while still fulfilling pastiche requests for long-deceased authors like Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway.
The audit found that competitors handle literary style requests quite differently. For instance, Google’s Gemini complies directly with named-author style requests without restriction, while Claude and Copilot comply with style prompts but attach disclaimers or process warnings. Perplexity AI enforces the strictest ban, refusing to copy living or deceased authors.
While US copyright law generally protects specific text expressions rather than abstract writing styles, OpenAI is taking no chances. The company remains locked in high-profile copyright battles with many prominent creators.
In 2023, George R.R. Martin and other fiction heavyweights joined class-action lawsuits against the company over unauthorized ingestion of their books, following earlier complaints targeting how AI models were trained on pirated e-book libraries. This litigation is pushing lawmakers to rewrite AI copyright rules.
By stopping ChatGPT from copying authors too closely, OpenAI hopes to protect itself from more legal trouble. However, some casual Reddit users are already complaining about broken workflows and about custom prompts being rejected.
For now, if you want Stephen King’s signature voice in your manuscript, you will have to put in the work and write it yourself.
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